While the default iOS Calendar app can give you a list of your upcoming events in the Notification Center, here’s how to put a full month calendar in your iPhone’s Notification Center.

Too many times I’ve had to open up the Calendar app to see which day a certain date falls on. In fact, that’s the only reason I keep the Calendar app readily available on my home screen. However, there’s a third-party app that makes the process way easier, and all I have to do now is open up the Notification Center on my iPhone and I get a full month calendar right then and there.

This makes it way easier to look up certain dates, and I get more use out of it than I do with the default iOS Calendar widget. Don’t get me wrong, seeing your upcoming appointments and events in your Notification Center can be useful, but for me, it’s just kind of useless, since I don’t have a lot of appointments and events going on all the time, meaning I don’t really need to constantly look at my calendar.

Instead, I like to reference a full month calendar when I need to, I finally discovered a handy third-party widget that puts all that right in my Notification Center. Here’s how to do it.

Adding a Full Calendar to the Notification Center

To install this awesome full month calendar in your iPhone’s Notification Center, you’ll need to download an app called Widget Calendar. It’s available in the iTunes App Store for $0.99 and it’s worth every penny.

Once it’s downloaded, open it up to configure its settings. The app itself isn’t the widget, but merely just the settings that you can change around to customize it.

To get the actual widget working, simply just swipe down from the top of the screen to open up the Notification Center. Tap Edit at the bottom and select the green + icon next to W. Calendar. This will move the item to the top, and if you have other widgets, you can arrange their order my holding down the icon with the there horizontal lines and dragging the item to the top or bottom.

When you’re finished, tap Done in the upper-right corner.

You’ll now see the calendar in your Notification Center, providing you with a full month right at your fingertips. The widget highlights what day it currently is, and tapping on View will open up the iOS Calendar app to interact with appointments and events.

You can also tap the arrows to the left and right of the month and year to look at past months or future months, respectively.

As for the settings that you can configure, there’s Mini Mode, which condenses the calendar view down to just a week, where you can then tap on the down arrow to bring up the full month. This is a good feature to enable if you have a lot of widgets in your Notification Center.

You can enable the calendar to star the week on Monday, which some users like doing, as the traditional split of Saturday and Sunday can be a bit weird to some folks.

You can also give the widget access to your iOS Calendar and show events, or at least allow the widget to highlight days that you have things going on.

Lastly, you can change the theme of the calendar, choosing either White or Black, although black looks the best in the Notification Center, and it matches perfectly with the overall look of iOS 8.

Be aware that once you’re done configuring the settings of Widget Calendar, the app icon is essentially useless, so if you have a folder where you put all of your unused apps in, it might be a good idea to go ahead and toss it in there. Otherwise, it will just take up space on your home screen.